A kind request to native speakers of English

[kasiaaaa]

Dear all,

 

I study Psycholinguistics and I am preparing materials for my MA research project. In order to make sure that the stimuli I have collected so far are fine, I need to test them first on the native speakers of English.

 

As I live in Poland, I kindly ask you to help me with this challenging task and take the following surveys.  I will be extremely grateful.

 

http://www.instant.ly/s/wg6pz

http://www.instant.ly/s/wk9PW

http://www.instant.ly/s/ZvYx3

 

The surveys consist of the same task, but stimuli lists are different.

Completing them won’t take much time, promise. I hope you will enjoy them and make some interesting observations for your research as well.

Feel free to pass the links to anybody who could be interested in taking the surveys as well.

 

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

Best,

Kasia

[Loric]

I started the first one, became frustrated and stopped. The random word pairs seemed to become more and more pointless and the list seemed like it was never going to end. I gave up.

I'm on an iPhone so I had to keep scrolling and gave up well before reaching the bottom.

Also, trying to judge nonsense pairings for literal/metaphorical usage quickly became confusing.

[Henry Hudson]

I agree that it does seem more like a random pairing of words than actual expressions, in many cases. Only a few seem to be common expressions, and a bunch, rather than expressions, are just words that can go together in the middle of a sentence rather than stand on their own as expressions. And many just do not go together at all. 

 

As such, it makes it hard to make a quick decision as to literal/metaphoric as the odd pairings make one have to dwell on possible contexts before answering, and that makes the already long list all the more discouraging and, frankly, a bit annoying. 

[pqo309]

I'm guessing you guys have never undergone an ERP test.... At least you can blink while you do these!

 

Post-attempt edit: I should've tried it before opening my big mouth. I agree with them. Why are there so many options? I mean, seven seems excessively gray. Why can't you just use two - literal or metaphorical? And maybe a third for "I don't get this" so you can strike out stimuli that don't make sense.

Edited December 29, 2013 by pqo309